In the closing days of 2021, a Washington hotel manager called police repeatedly about an ex-boyfriend she said was stalking her.
A Chance Meeting at the OYO Hotel
Gloria Choi worked at the OYO Hotel in Washington state, where her friend Brieanna Eberly had been brought on by Gloria in 2018 to help out. In May 2021, a guest named Billy Rickman checked in after traveling from California.
Those who met him described a man with a larger-than-life personality, and he noticed Gloria almost immediately.
When she walked into the hotel office one day, he introduced himself and told her she was very pretty. She thanked him and left. Eberly told him the woman’s name and advised him to stay away from her.
Rickman did not follow that advice. Before long, he and Gloria were texting frequently. Gloria liked the way he spoke to her, and Eberly said all she wanted was to be loved by somebody.
Meaghan Driscoll, the attorney who represents the Choi family, said Rickman came across as a nice man who showered Gloria with gifts and kindness. Gloria’s friend Jacob Blue said she was drawn to the masculine energy he displayed.
Rickman also formed an instant bond with Gloria’s seven-year-old son, whom she was raising on her own, because he behaved almost like a child himself.
Within weeks, the two were a couple, and Rickman began staying in Gloria’s apartment at the hotel. Her parents, who owned the property, did not approve. Her father asked that Rickman move out.
Eberly said Rickman then approached the couple and told them he was not going anywhere, that Gloria was now his, and that if they disliked it, they could leave. Gloria’s father gave her a choice: stay on as manager without Rickman, or leave. She chose to leave.
In September 2021, Gloria, her son and Rickman moved into an apartment in the town of Tumwater. Her heartbroken parents sold the hotel. Gloria took a new position as manager of the Holiday Inn Express in Lakewood, a city next to Tacoma.
A Relationship Unravels
Gloria was initially happy in her new job and home, but the feeling did not last. Rickman talked about big plans without any means of paying for them.
When Gloria asked who would fund them and told him to find a job, he refused. Eberly said Gloria ended up buying everything and that Rickman was constantly asking her for money.
Within weeks, Gloria told Eberly that Rickman was often mean, angry and insecure. She also said he drank to excess and used cocaine and marijuana. Eberly’s advice was short: leave, and run away.
Gloria stayed for two more months. In November, she called Blue and told him Rickman had become physical, pushing and throwing her around. She said she did not feel safe simply ending the relationship, and she feared it could set something off in him.
She was also troubled by how much he seemed to know about her movements. She had found a tracking device, an Apple AirTag, in her car, and she suspected more were hidden in her truck. Blue told her to leave him immediately.
Six months after the couple met, Gloria told Eberly she had made up her mind. Her plan was to go to her parents’ home, and they welcomed her and her son. Leaving the relationship proved harder than leaving the apartment, however.
Rickman had borrowed Gloria’s truck and refused to return it. On November 28, she went to the Tumwater police to report the truck as taken. While there, she also spoke to the officer about Rickman.
She said he was calm when sober but had a short fuse and became very angry when he drank. She wished him well, she said, but was choosing to end his place in her life for the safety and stability of her son and herself.
The officer’s report noted that Rickman might be tracking Gloria with AirTags, that he owned numerous firearms, and that he appeared extremely manipulative.
Concerned for her safety, the officer asked the court to issue a domestic violence no-contact order.
Rickman was arrested almost immediately for taking the truck, which was then returned to Gloria. He spent three days in jail. On December 1, 2021, he was brought before a judge, who imposed the order.
The order did not appear to concern him. On the day he was released, he told Eberly, “So? I’m still going to talk to her.”
He went to her home, begged her to speak to Gloria about getting back together, and promised to stop drinking and become a better person. Eberly did not believe him. She explained that a no-contact order barred any contact, including texts, calls and physical presence, and that violating it meant jail.
Four Calls in 48 Hours
About two weeks later, a friend called Eberly to say Gloria was hiding in the bathroom of a coffee shop. Eberly drove there and saw Rickman’s car in the parking lot. They made eye contact.
Inside, she knocked on the bathroom door, and Gloria opened it. Gloria was crying and shaking, and she refused to leave the bathroom until she knew Rickman was gone. It is not clear whether police were called.
Three days later, Gloria told Eberly that Rickman had confronted her at the Capital Mall while she was shopping with her son. He pleaded with her to drop the no-contact order, and she refused.
Around this period, he also recorded cell phone videos addressed to Gloria, meant to make her feel bad about leaving him.
On December 30, Rickman saw Gloria with Blue at a coffee shop and emailed her immediately. The message read, “You left me for another guy, wow.”
Gloria began receiving calls from a blocked number, and Blue said Rickman yelled at her when she answered. Blue said Rickman believed he was a potential boyfriend.
The pair moved on to a sushi restaurant. Gloria became increasingly uncomfortable with a car whose headlights were aimed at the restaurant.
Blue said she told him she knew that car and that it was watching them. When they left, they found that someone had stolen their computers from Gloria’s truck and slashed one of its tires.
Gloria called the police, the first of four calls about Rickman over a 48-hour period. She was confident Rickman was responsible, and she told the officer that only he knew the keypad code that opened the truck.
She described his black BMW and mentioned the no-contact order. The officer left Rickman a voicemail saying police wanted to speak with him.
Gloria and Blue then drove to the Holiday Inn to pick up Blue’s Jeep, and they discovered two of its tires had been slashed. Snow covered the ground. Gloria filmed the footprints she believed were Rickman’s.
Because she managed the hotel, she was able to obtain its surveillance footage. It showed a man slipping in through the shadows, puncturing both tires and walking away. Gloria and Blue called the police a second time and handed over the video.
Both identified the man as Rickman by his distinctive walk. Officers said that without a view of his face, there was little they could do, and the video was not clear enough for an arrest.
The next day, New Year’s Eve, Blue returned to the Jeep with two new tires and found the other two slashed. This prompted a third call to 911.
The surveillance footage again showed a man Gloria and Blue believed was Rickman, and police again said it was too unclear to identify him.
That same night, the Holiday Inn’s desk clerk made a fourth call after spotting the tire slasher puncturing tires on the Jeep once more. He chased the man and recorded a video as he phoned 911.
Around this time, Gloria gave an officer a seven-page document. It listed the many times she said Rickman had violated the no-contact order through emails and calls, and it included a still frame from one of the Holiday Inn videos. No arrest was made.
The Night of January 2
With the tires on Gloria’s truck slashed, the vehicle was out of commission, and the tags hidden inside it could no longer show Rickman where she was. Phone location data show that in the following days he repeatedly returned to the area around her parents’ home, where she was living.
On the evening of January 2, 2022, Gloria was heading home, taking a break from work to eat dinner. Rickman’s phone data show that shortly before 6 p.m. he switched it off.
He was driving right behind her when she left the hotel. He forced her vehicle onto a gravel shoulder, pinching it off so that she could not move forward.
Gloria called 911. She told the dispatcher that the man was her boyfriend but did not give his name. Rickman got out of his vehicle carrying a gun, and she described to the dispatcher what he was doing as it happened.
Prosecutors say he did not try to speak to her and began shooting at once. Standing beside the driver’s side window of her locked truck, he fired nine .40-caliber bullets through the door and window.
He began to drive away, and Gloria’s truck rolled forward about 60 yards until it struck a utility pole. Prosecutors say the truck moved because her foot was no longer pressing the brake.
Rickman made a U-turn and pulled alongside her truck. Without leaving his car, he lowered his window and fired five more shots. Then he drove off.
Several people nearby heard the gunfire. One witness described a burst of seven or eight rapid shots and ran over to call the police. Terry Estvold, who was about 30 feet away, gave officers a detailed description of what he saw.
Officers from the Lakewood Police Department arrived within minutes. The truck’s doors were locked, so they smashed out a rear window, which allowed them to preserve evidence, and quickly pulled Gloria out.
Estvold said they put her on the ground and worked on her hard for several minutes. He said the sight still bothers him. She was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. She had been hit at least ten times.
Eberly, Gloria’s best friend, soon heard the news and could not accept it. She called Gloria’s phone repeatedly and got no answer. Then she called Gloria’s father, who answered and confirmed that Gloria was gone.
The investigation turned on a lanyard. One of the first officers at the scene noticed a Holiday Inn lanyard on Gloria and read her name on it.
The officer had taken a report from Gloria only days earlier, when Gloria called 911 to say an ex-boyfriend was following and harassing her. Now police had a name: Billy Rickman.
A detective subpoenaed Rickman’s phone records. Even without the phone itself, investigators could read his text messages. In one, he said he was at the Home Motel, a six-minute drive from the scene.
The detective went there at once. The desk clerk said that days earlier, Rickman had tried to check in under a fake name, but the clerk had insisted on proof of identity.
Surveillance video from the motel showed Rickman returning after the shooting. He climbed out of his vehicle in a hurry and began wiping down the side of it, in an area that could carry gunpowder residue. He was on his phone. The phone came back on at the motel for the first time since the shooting.
Investigators then checked cameras at businesses in the area. A nearby Enterprise car rental office had clear footage of Rickman renting a Chevy Colorado under his real name.
It was the same vehicle seen at the motel, and police believe it is the one he used to run Gloria off the road. Lakewood police issued an alert for him, but he was nowhere to be found.
Arrest, Trial and Lawsuit
On January 6, law enforcement tracked Rickman’s phone to Humboldt County in Northern California. He had turned up drunk at a relative’s house. The relative did not want him to stay and offered to drive him to a nearby casino and put him up in its hotel.
Tribal police stopped the relative’s black BMW, and the California Highway Patrol was called to the scene. Dash camera video shows Rickman shoving the relative out of the driver’s seat onto the pavement and speeding away.
He had enough of a head start that officers lost him. Rickman wandered for about five hours on a cold, wet night before he was found and taken into custody, soaking wet and hypothermic. He was charged with aggravated first-degree murder and pleaded not guilty.
In Oakland, California, a woman named Aja Houle received a call from a police officer telling her Rickman had been arrested. Houle had filed a police report about him.
She said that in 2005, when she was a 14-year-old runaway living in Oakland, Rickman forced her into prostitution and sexually assaulted her. Years of abuse followed, and she was nearly killed when he choked her with a strand of Christmas tree lights.
Her escape to San Francisco felt like freedom but also brought terror, because she had crossed Rickman and knew what he was capable of. Shortly afterward she phoned a friend who was living with Rickman, and he took the phone and threatened to kill her if he ever found her.
She took it as a promise rather than a threat. Years later, while completing a master’s degree in public affairs at the University of California, Berkeley, she found the courage to report him to the Oakland police, having always wanted justice.
The report detailed multiple incidents, including punches to her face and body that left a black eye, bruises and cuts. Oakland police issued an arrest warrant in Alameda County in 2021, but by then Rickman had left California.
Washington prosecutors say they never saw it. Houle was angry and upset because she believed he could have been stopped earlier, and she blamed herself in some way.
Houle emailed the prosecutors on the Gloria Choi case to offer information. They declined, because they wanted to keep the case focused on the murder.
Rickman’s trial began in November 2023 before a jury of nine men and three women. Gloria’s family, too devastated to attend, had moved out of town without a word.
Prosecutor Greg Greer played Gloria’s 911 call in its entirety right after the opening statements, and people in the courtroom noticed the atmosphere change while it played.
Greer, who learned Korean in the Air Force, said he could clearly hear Gloria calling for her mother: “Eomma, Eomma.”
The prosecution laid out its case methodically with the audio and video evidence investigators had collected, including a compilation of phone data, GPS coordinates and surveillance footage from various locations. Eberly testified.
She described watching Rickman look at Gloria’s picture and begin to cry, which made her furious. She said he had taken a daughter, a mother, a friend, a sister and a cousin in the blink of an eye.
The defense called no witnesses, and Rickman did not testify. In closing arguments, his lawyer argued that investigators had failed to examine other possible suspects.
He noted that Gloria never named Rickman on her 911 call and described the driver only as her boyfriend. The trial lasted two weeks. The jury deliberated for about two hours and, on December 7, 2023, found Rickman guilty of aggravated murder.
It also found that he was armed with a firearm and that two aggravating factors applied: he fired the gun from or near a vehicle, and he violated a no-contact order.
On December 15, 2023, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Greer, who had spent 30 years in the prosecutor’s office, retired in 2024.
The trial was the last of his career, and he says he is still trying to find his way back to humanity and to put aside the violence that surrounded him for so many years.
Driscoll filed a wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of Gloria’s son against the city of Lakewood and its police department. Gloria’s parents believe she should still be alive.
The family wants accountability for what happened and believes that law enforcement mismanaged and mishandled the situation. Driscoll says the death was foreseeable and preventable and that Lakewood police should have found and arrested Rickman to protect Gloria.
It relies on the same evidence of stalking that prosecutors presented at trial, and it contends that law enforcement took no steps to locate or arrest Rickman in the days before her death.
It says Gloria told an officer she believed Rickman was staying at a nearby motel, and the Home Motel is only a six-minute walk from the Holiday Inn.
It says police did not follow up on the desk clerk’s detailed description of the truck, a beige Chevy Colorado with broken taillights, and did not put out a lookout for it.
One of the officers said he drove around searching for Rickman’s BMW, but Driscoll says no police record of that exists. The suit also argues that the seven-page document gave police everything they needed to arrest him.
Driscoll retained Russ Hicks, a retired law enforcement officer and former lead instructor in domestic violence, as an expert witness. Hicks taught the three officers involved in the case at the police academy.
He said the officers had received proper training and that they failed Gloria. He criticized the voicemail in particular, saying it conveyed that police were not looking for Rickman or taking the matter seriously.
In January 2025, a city lawyer told a judge during a hearing on the suit that police have no obligation to arrest someone like Rickman if he is not at the scene.
John Justice, the attorney representing the city and its police department, said he could not comment on pending litigation.
The city has denied the allegations, stating in its court response that police did not have direct knowledge that Gloria was in immediate danger and that their actions did not place her in harm’s way.
The Washington Court of Appeals, Division II, held a hearing in the estate’s case against the city on March 5, 2025, and as of May 2026, the lawsuit remained unresolved.
Rickman also challenged his conviction. On July 14, 2026, the Court of Appeals affirmed it in an unpublished opinion. The court rejected three arguments.
It held that a 911 transcript used in a search warrant application, which left out the words “I think” before Gloria said her boyfriend was following her, did not warrant a hearing, because the omission was not material.
It held that Rickman’s phone location data was admissible because a second warrant, obtained during the trial, served as an independent source. It also held that jurors could hear evidence that Rickman tampered with his jail cell window in May 2022, which the trial court had allowed as a sign of consciousness of guilt.
Remembering Gloria Choi
Gloria Choi spent most of her life working in her family’s hotel business. She wanted to please her parents to the best of her ability, and Eberly described her as their lifeline, a woman who did it all and did it all with grace.
Her parents spoke of her as their angel. Eberly said Gloria was part of her own family too, and that her whole family knew and loved her.
She came across as shy and quiet, but those who knew her say she was anything but. She was passionate about her family and her son, and she had hopes and dreams of her own.
Friends remember a hardworking mother and a good role model who became fiercely protective whenever her son was involved.
One friend said Gloria reminded her every day that she was a good person and a good mother, at a time when she doubted herself. That reassurance, the friend said, gave her hope and changed her sense of self-worth in ways she could hardly describe.
Recent Comments